Movie Hype Aside, Forest Holds Secrets

Uncovering Forest Secrets

July 08, 1993|By DANIEL P. JONES; Courant Environment Writer

In the 1992 movie "Medicine Man," Sean Connery plays a kind of prospector. He goes to the Amazon rain forest and, with help from an indigenous healer, comes across a substance in nature that can cure cancer.

Is this just a lot of Hollywood hocus-pocus?

"Certainly not," said Robert Colwell, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut.

The Connery character was not scientifically savvy enough to be believable, he says, but the movie's premise -- that the Earth's plants and animals hold undiscovered benefits for humankind -- is sound.

The National Cancer Institute, in fact, has identified more than 2,000 tropical rain forest plants with the potential to fight cancer. Taxol, a drug given federal approval just last year for use against ovarian cancer, is derived from the bark of Pacific yew trees that grow in the Northwest.

More than half of the world's important prescription drugs, Colwell said, were derived from wild plants. Pharmaceutical companies for years have sent what he calls chemical prospectors into the forests of the world, especially in the tropics, to search for substances that can be used in new drugs.

But only recently, perhaps in the past two or three years, have politicians and large segments of the public begun paying attention to the need to conserve and preserve the world's forests, which contain thousands of species that have not been inventoried and are being lost as activities such as timber-cutting or slash-and-burn farming continue to destroy their habitats.

Earlier this year, President Clinton, reversing a stand taken by George Bush, signed a landmark international treaty to restrict the destruction of plant and animal species.

All of this interest in saving the world's remaining natural reserves, such as the tropical rain forests and the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, is driving dramatic growth in an area of scientific and environmental study that has come to be

known as biodiversity.

At the University of Connecticut in Storrs, professors and graduate students are part of this academic boom.

In May, the university, together with the state Department of Environmental Protection and the state Museum of Natural History, opened a new Center for Conservation and Biodiversity.

A month earlier, the National Science Foundation awarded the university a $550,000 Graduate Research Traineeship Grant, which will support work by doctoral students for five years in a new program of study in evolution, ecology and conservation of biodiversity.

Rich Kobe is among the UConn graduate students who have been awarded some of the new grant money. He is studying how tree seedlings survive and grow in the extremely low-light environment beneath the tree canopy of a rain forest in Costa Rica.

"It is quite dark," he said of the tropical forest. "But it's not too much darker than an old-growth stand in Connecticut."

Still, he said, it's a completely different experience from being in a New England forest. "You can walk 10 meters in the rain forest and come across 10 species of tree seedlings," Kobe said. In forests in northwestern Connecticut, where Kobe also does research, there are only about 10 dominant tree species.

Tropical forests, which cover about 7 percent of the Earth, are home to perhaps half of all living creatures, scientists estimate.

"If we're going to actually try to save the forests, not just for the next 50 years but indefinitely, we're going to have to learn about how they work," Kobe said.

Colwell, who will spend much of this summer in Costa Rica working on an inventory of species of insects and arachnids, said that preservation and restoration of habitats are the ultimate aims of biodiversity studies.

"It's far cheaper to have nature do it than in seed banks and zoos and tissue-culture banks or gene banks," he said.

"Not to belittle those," he said, "but those are tremendously expensive to maintain. The easy way to do it is to have the habitats where the species repose stay healthy."

Some of the grant money will enable scientists to discover and name new species of plants and animals.

Stuart McKamey, an entomologist and taxonomist who also received some of the new money at UConn, is studying and inventorying treehoppers -- a type of insect that sucks sap from trees -- that live in the canopy of the rain forest in Peru.

McKamey has viewed specimens of as many as 250 treehopper species, many of which are in the collections of the British Museum in London, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. He has carefully studied 40 species, half of which are new to science and have been given names by McKamey.